Extra £1.5m for community health care in Norfolk

An extra £1.5m is to be ploughed into community health care in Norfolk.

Patients are to get an expanded out-of-hours community nursing service, care at home teams, providing support to patients in their homes, are also to be rolled out, while each GP practice is to get its own ‘named link nurse’ to improve co-ordination of community-based NHS care.

The move is down to a new agreement on the community health care service provided in Norfolk, excluding Great Yarmouth.

The new specification launches from this month, with more improve-ments and expanded services coming online in the next few months. NHS Norfolk and Waveney has agreed the extra investment to enable the expansion of services to be delivered by Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust (NCH&C).

NCH&C’s care-at-home teams, which have previously only been commissioned in south Norfolk, will now be providing supervised, non qualified, health care support to patients in their own homes in other areas of Norfolk.

A dedicated ‘named link nurse’ will also be working with each GP practice, acting as a direct clinical link between the practice and NCH&C.

Anna Morgan, NCH&C’s director of operations, said: “Our community nursing and therapy teams currently have, on average, around 108,000 face-to-face contacts with local patients every month.

“The new specification for community-based services has an even stronger focus on keeping these patients stable and independent, while avoiding unnecessary acute hospital admissions, wherever possible.”

kim.briscoe@archant.co.uk

1 comment

the final injection of cash before these services become privatised ? its slowly happening !